Elasticsearch 2.0.0-beta1 released

Today, we are excited to announce the release of Elasticsearch 2.0.0-beta1, based on Lucene 5.2.1. This release contains over 2,500 pull requests from 469 committers. 850 of the pull requests are completely new to 2.0.

IMPORTANT: This is a beta release and is intended for testing purposes only. There is no guarantee that Elasticsearch 2.0.0-beta1 will be compatible with Elasticsearch 2.0.0 GA.

More reliance on feedback loops instead of settings for auto-regulation.

Writes to transaction logs are atomic and durable by default.

A big cleanup to type mappings to make them safe, unambiguous, and reliable.

Binding only to localhost by default.

Cluster state diffs for faster change propagation.

Besides the above, there are hundreds of incremental changes in both Elasticsearch and Lucene which make Elasticsearch 2.0 safer, better, and easier. Have a look at these blog posts for more information about this release:

Core plugins

We have changed the way we develop our core plugins. These officially supported plugins now reside in the main elasticsearch repository which means that they are tested along with core and are released at the same time as Elasticsearch. Core plugins now have the same version number as Elasticsearch and can be installed as in the following example:

Commercial plugins

Our commercial plugins will also use the same versioning as Elasticsearch and will be released along with Elasticsearch. Shield and Watcher are already available for 2.0.0-beta1 and can be installed as follows:

Elasticsearch Migration Plugin

We have released the Elasticsearch Migration Plugin to help you check whether you need to upgrade your indices, or take any other action, before trying out Elasticsearch 2.0.0-beta1. It will help you to detect issues like problematic mappings that will no longer work in the upcoming 2.0.0.